Caoimhe’s reviews

The Devils ★★★★★

2026-11-09T12:51:31+00:00

Call me vain and proud, the greatest sinner ever to walk God’s earth, but Satan’s boy I could never be. I haven’t the humility.

Absolutely phenomenal. I don’t know what to say about it. Warner Bros. used to make fucking movies.

Dune ★★★☆☆

2026-11-08T11:19:57+00:00

Watching at a friend’s house at DVD quality on a TV with motion smoothing left on gives the production, especially in the early scenes, the quality of watching a strangely high-budget episode of classic Doctor Who. The film is in general a mess, stuffed with voiceover and exposition to try and over-explain what is happening at all times while still being a muddled, confusing mess if you aren’t already familiar enough with the novel to give you a structure to support the avalanche of scenes that this film throws at you. Still, it’s just kind of a visual delight to watch. I dare say it might actually be better absorbed with all the dialogue muted and just grand musical accompaniment to match the visual spectacle and theatrical acting.

Also interesting to examine as the origin of Command & Conquer via Dune II. Some influences are obvious (harvesters, carryalls), but seeing Paul casually flinging around a prop minigun like it’s nothing makes me wonder if their presence as light infantry weapons in this film is the reason for the otherwise very strange decision that the basic troops in Tiberian Dawn are defined as being minigunners rather than riflemen.

Clue(do) ★★★☆☆

2026-11-03T20:44:15+00:00

Very fun energy to the whole thing. Tim Curry’s excited recap of the whole thing at the end feels like it’s desperately trying to get the audience invested for a big reveal that is fairly arbitrary, as is clear from the fact that there are three different endings that you can slot in at the end.

Video Nasty S1 ★★★☆☆

2026-11-03T20:30:50+00:00

Playing in some of the same space as How to Get to Heaven from Belfast with the horror comedy and nostalgia trappings, but feels more consistent and less dragged out. Unfortunately the last episode felt like the weakest, somewhat all over the place, with an epilogue fishing for a second series.

Avatar: Seven Havens S1: Survival ★★★☆☆

2026-11-02T17:35:22+00:00

Starts off a bit shaky, feeling very stuck in place with the plot jerking forward in spurts, with plot points not so much developing as being ignored for a few episodes and then brought back up as if they’d been central the entire time. But it picks up a lot as the stakes escalate and the true form of the story starts to take shape.

A lot of the east Asian influences and aesthetics have been left by the wayside, with a made up writing system replacing Han script and a lot more generic scifi vibes along with some more Arabic-influenced architecture for the post-apocalyptic desert setting, but inversely I feel that the show seems more comfortable than its predecessors to casually drop in small cultural details like food in a non-exoticising way. I don’t think that previous Avatar shows ever mentioned congee.

Centring chakras as part of the avatar journey this time rather than the elements seems like it could be interesting and potentially bring in those elements of spiritualism more seriously than the original show did, and that with the eponymous havens seems to signal that the show is planning on seven series, which is very ambitious but if they actually have a grand plan for that I am interesting in seeing where it goes.

The Simpsons S6 ★★★★★

2026-10-26T20:22:36+00:00

I have once again run out of things to say about The Simpsons. Continues to be shockingly consistent. A fun thing to note in “Who Shot Mr. Burns?” part one is that when Burns asks if anyone has the guts to stop him in the town hall everyone who had been threatening him averts their eyes in shame other than Maggie.

Garth Marenghi’s Terrortome ★★★☆☆

2026-10-26T20:01:01+00:00

Read with extreme caution.

It’s a good time but it lacks the punch that Darkplace has without the the dodgy framing, editing and scene pacing. Making the protagonist an obvious author stand-in is a fun way of making the character of Garth Marenghi more directly involved in the text, but it creates a strange dissonance where it seems like the voice of the text has much more awareness of his own flaws than his self-insert does.

Goodbye, Lara ★★★★☆

2026-10-20T19:43:41+01:00

This review contains spoilers.

In the opening scene, when Lara is being born, her sisters already know that she’s going to be a princess, but argue about if she will be a blue or red, as if mermaid gender is colour-based, and her father seems like the only clearly male mermaid around. Grace, witch, social outcast, is both red and blue, and in fish form she appears to be a male betta fish and while the show can’t use anything owned by Disney, Grace’s heavy makeup feels suggestive of Ursula, famously based on a drag queen Divine. Even the name is suggestive of a connection. And similarly, Kota, judging from his size, appears to be a female anglerfish, while being very small as a human. It’s not really textual, but there are strong trans undercurrents flowing through the story. And that’s not even to mention the obvious parallels of suitors being disgusted when they find out the biology that Lara and Grace were born with, and learning to be vulnerable and open yourself to love despite fear of hurt and hatred and defiance of what the world says that you should be.

The show in general is gorgeous, funny and sweet. I really love Lara and Mari. I was expecting the ending to be much more harsh considering some comments I’ve seen about it, though I must admit it was strangely flat compared to what came before it, refusing to give the straightforward happy ending that was obviously being promised. Lara rejecting having to be defined by orthodox ideas of “true love” does make sense for her, but as Mari herself points out it’s a strange turn for Lara to say all that cringe shit about wanting to live in a world with her and then just fuck off to find herself afterwards instead. The final tension is never really resolved, just left to sit until we cut to black, with the audience feeling as lost as Mari is, with her own heart having been pierced through with neither the closure of the love being fully consummated nor having her heart completely torn out.

Columbo S8 ★★★☆☆

2026-10-20T17:09:47+01:00

Only four episodes. The first two feel like a return to form, with interesting gimmicks and twists on the formula. I love the surreal confrontations between Columbo and Brady in “Murder, Smoke and Shadows”, but things start to peter out after that with a disappointing back half.

The Crow ★★★☆☆

2026-10-18T08:17:31+01:00

Hi my name is Eric Dark'ness Dementia Draven Way and I have long wavy black hair that reaches my shoulders and deep brown eyes like limpid amber and a lot of people tell me I look like Sting (AN: if u don't know who she is get da hell out of here!). I'm not related to Gerard Way but I wish I was because he's a major fucking hottie. I'm a ghost but I don't wear a sheet. I have pale white skin. I'm also a zombie, and I'm in a rock band called Hangman's Joke in Detroit (I'm the lead guitarist). I'm a goth (in case you couldn't tell) and I wear mostly black. I love Hot Topic and I buy all my clothes from there. For example today I was wearing a torn black pullover with trash bags wrapped around it and a black leather pants and black combat boots. I was wearing black lipstick, white foundation, black eyeliner and black eye shadow. I was walking outside Gideon's pawn shop. It was raining and more raining so there was no sun, which I was very happy about. A lot of T-Bird's gang stared at me. I put up my middle finger at them.

Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace ★★★★★

2026-10-11T22:19:21+01:00

There are so many incredible little details in how “poorly” this is put together. So many little perfectly mistimed edits and jarring edits.

Dawn of the Dead ★★★★☆

2026-10-11T17:57:24+01:00

I think that I’ve seen this film too many times to even have thoughts about it anymore.

Daemons of the Shadow Realm S1 ★★☆☆☆

2026-10-11T16:59:44+01:00

Has an interesting premise but feels meandering and overloaded with characters who have had little to do, only a few of which are particularly fun or interesting. The scattering of minor voice actors from Fullmetal Alchemist doesn’t help shake the feeling that it’s a lesser work from Hiromu Arakawa. I do love Gabby, though, and I would be willing to give a second series a chance to pick up.

Hotline Miami ★★★☆☆

2026-10-09T17:01:36+01:00

Overall very, very fun but with frustrating difficulty spikes, awful bosses, and an eyeroll-worthy plot and ending.

Normal Golf Game ★★★★☆

2026-10-08T17:02:39+01:00

My partner had this game on her Steam wishlist, and when they got a notification that it was on sale, they asked me if I had been the one to recommend it to her. I can see why she made that assumption when I possess both a fondness for games with awkward, physical control schemes and weird golf, but I had actually never heard of the game before. I watched her play a lot of it and knew that I would want to experience myself.

I really love the UI, the maximalism off all these different segments tracking different parts of one’s shot and having to juggle positioning, angle, swing and posture together. The greenscreen video for the player character is also wonderfully charming. The golf is tricky, but manageable, an very satisfying to hone.

ROM Check Panic! ★★★☆☆

2026-10-07T15:22:13+01:00

Very cute concept. I really like how the different maps for each game are so chaotically recontextualised as the mechanics get swapped from one to another. Would love to see it expanded with even more variety.

The Yellow Wallpaper ★★★★☆

2026-10-06T17:03:08+01:00

If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do?

The dismissal, infantilisation and isolation faced by the protagonist is still infuriatingly resonant. Her husband, a physician, knows what’s best for her and refuses to let any objection or evidence to the contrary create a chink in his paternalism as his wife spirals further and further. And as a horror piece, the descriptions of the wallpaper itself are wonderfully vivid and horrid, and the changing relationship of the protagonist to it as, with her life emptied of anything else, it worms its way into her mind is great.

The King in Yellow ★★★★☆

2026-10-06T17:01:30+01:00

I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with its beautiful stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth—a world which now trembles before the King in Yellow.

As it turns out the copy that I got from the library only included the first four stories from the original 1895 anthology; the ones that directly reference The King in Yellow—within the stories the title of a play that drives all those who read it mad. This is well known to narrator of each story and appears to be widely known within the setting, but despite this the play appears to be widely published and available. There is, apparently, nothing clearly objectionable or untoward in any specific detail in the play, at least nothing that would justify censorship, but yet it has the effect of seizing the minds of all those who read it.

The first story, “The Repairer of Reputations”, beings with a description of a speculative history where the United States of America, following a war with Germany over Samoa, has taken a very authoritarian turn. Power has been centralised in the presidency, cities have been drastically razed and remodelled, policies of ethnic segregation put in place, and suicide chambers have been erected across the country. This is not, really, directly relevant to the plot of any of the short stories, which mostly concern the personal struggles and decline of various artists in New York and Paris, and none of the other three stories expand on this setting much, but it paints a backdrop of a world itself going mad, as if the presence and spread of the malignant play in the world has lead to a general madness and decline as much as it has the downfall of each individual protagonist.

But the final story of the four, “The Yellow Sign”, calls this all into question. The narrators, up until now, have been unreliable, driven to madness by the play and clearly gripped by hallucination in some way, but “The Yellow Sign” calls into question even the basic facts of the world. It makes explicit reference to the protagonist of “The Repairer of Reputations” and makes it clear that those events are in the past, but then also directly contradicts the opening lecture on the recent history of the United States: The statue of Garibaldi in Washington Square Park was said to have been replaced with one of Peter Stuyvesant, yet, in “The Yellow Sign” Garibaldi still stands, no mention being made of the change, or any of the other radical differences outlined in the first story, being evident.

It calls into question not just the more fantastical or dreamlike elements of the stories, or the parts that are clearly signalled to be delusions. There is not just a breakdown in the individual, but an infohazard causing a divergence in the shared social reality—on what people agree to be the basic facts of the world. I am often frustrated by storytelling that calls itself into question like this, that posits that perhaps it was all just a dream, but in this case it feels like a strong echo of the initial picture of a world declining into madness, where base reality itself is in question, and I think it also echoes both the present moment of social divide and also the age of yellow journalism that the stories were published in. The King in Yellow and the Yellow Kid; two sides of the same coin.

The Simpsons S5 ★★★★★

2026-10-05T19:39:16+01:00

Watching back over this show it is striking the sheer amount of jokes about Bart, Homer and Abe crossdressing and how into it they are presented as being every time. This is, of course, of its time, and obviously meant purely as humour, but like with 2010s bromance jokes if one simply does not view crossdressing or transness as inherently ridiculous, then at some point it just starts to feel like every man in the Simpson family really isn’t getting enough œstrogen.

The Lab ★★★★☆

2026-10-04T20:55:47+01:00

This is just a collection of minigames designed to be a nice introduction to VR, but it does its job well and gives a good tour of different aspects of the technology. “Postcards” and the solar system and human body scan models show how it can be used to experience the world in new ways, “Robot Repair” and “Secret Shop” are little narrative pieces that show it as portals into new worlds, and the slingshot and longbow minigames show off some physics-based gameplay.

“Xortex 26XX” is what really stands out to me in this collection, though. A little 3D shmup that both convinced me the real difference between a VR and traditional, flat game and also broadened my idea of what a VR game meant. It’s, interestingly, not first person as one might assume would be the default for VR games. The headset is simply the viewpoint into the world but does not act as a head for any character. Instead a small spaceship is tied to the position of the controller and the player must manœuvre through a three-dimensional bullet hell. This is both hectic and natural. Within the VR perspective I found that I had an intuitive understanding of where everything lay in space beyond what I would in any other kind of computer game. I could look around without paying close attention to the position of the ship (I know where my hand is, after all) and cleanly judge how to move around bullet patterns that I could map out the trajectories of by instinct in a way that I have never been able to with other shoot ’em ups. I very much want to play a more fully-featured version of this game.

Beat Sabre ★★★★★

2026-10-04T20:42:36+01:00

Getting back into VR most of my time, as with when I had this setup before, has been spent sweating in Beat Sabre. This is probably the most exercise I’ve gotten in a while. Getting into the rhythm of a song with your body in a very literal way is incredibly satisfying, and it helps that standing on an unmoving stage helps with a lot of the disorientation and motion sickness that many VR games can cause.

I don’t really know what most of the built-in songs are or what the campaign mode even does, I just use it to play custom maps that people have made. My main rotation is a lot of Toby Fox tracks, some Sonic the Hedgehog music, and a smattering of old favourite songs and silly bullshit. I do tend to go back to the Deltarune and Undertale tracks over and over, though—the energetic but fairly straightforward melodies are prefect for this kind of workout. A lot of people have done really fun things with how they map out tracks as well. Two of my favourites are the “Death By Glamour” track I have downloaded making one rapidly do disjointed at the start, like Metaton, and “I'll Make a Man Out of You” having one act out training activities like swimming at certain parts of the song.

Old ★★★☆☆

2026-10-04T20:22:29+01:00

This review contains spoilers.

The dog has died!

He was only just alive!

This film has one single idea, a beach that makes you old, and it somehow keeps going with it for nearly two hours. This could have been a neat episode in some kind of anthology, but ends up being an overstretched, surreal mess with dialogue that seems like it was written by an alien and actors who do not know how to deliver any of it. A lot of lines had me in stitches, the evil company doing a stolen lives acknowledgement was a particular highlight.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit ★★★★★

2026-10-04T20:15:31+01:00

This review contains spoilers.

They are showing off so much with how much the toons interact with the world, it’s such an impressive work of filmmaking. It’s also still just very funny and charming and I adore how Judge Doom being so obviously, cartoonishly evil and out of step with the other human characters acts as foreshadowing to the fact that he is in fact a toon himself, and how the film uses that as a statement that the dismantling of public infrastructure and impoverished neighbourhoods in the name of suburban development is itself something only a cartoon villain could want.

Aperture Hand Lab ★★☆☆☆

2026-09-28T20:27:02+01:00

I have dug my old HTC Vive out of storage and managed to get the tracking (mostly) consistently working this time. Much like when I was more actively playing VR stuff years ago I have mostly been playing Beat Sabre, but I never got around to playing this little tech demo before so I figured that I might as well. It’s a cute little intro to hand tracking and nothing more. It’s even more slight than Aperture Desk Job, but it suffices for what it is and now I have finally completed the Aperture Hand Job duology.

Furuhata Chūgakusei ★★★☆☆

2026-09-27T14:39:54+01:00

A cute little special, sadly hampered by the bad machine-generated subtitles that I was watching with, and lacks the specific style and touches of Furuhata proper, but I enjoyed the reveal of how all of these different, unconnected cases could possibly be related.

Oh and since it establishes that Furuhata’s father is American and absent I am going to assume that Columbo is his dad.

Your Name ★★★★☆

2026-09-27T14:39:13+01:00

There is more obvious and sillier things to build a trans reading of the film on—Mitsuha wishing to be reincarnated as a boy in Tokyo, Taki enjoying having breasts so much—but it is striking how much more comfortable the two leads are in each other’s skins. We are told that Taki is normally brash and quick to get into fights, but we only ever actually see that side of him when he is in Mitsuha’s body, and Mitsuha is similarly much more assertive with Miki than she is with anyone in her own life, or than Taki is with her either.

Perfect Blue ★★★★☆

2026-09-27T14:38:43+01:00

The last Satoshi Kon feature film that I hadn’t seen. It’s a shame that he died so young and did not have the opportunity to make more. The film is fairly horrible in its handling of dissociative identity disorder and its use of ugliness as grotesquely and personal evil, but unfortunately that is not at all unusual. But it is utterly gripping in its depiction of Mima unraveling as she gets ground down by her treatment as a woman and a celebrity. Definitely something I’d be keen to rewatch to pick apart earlier scenes with a better understanding of the whole.

The Song of Achilles ★★★★★

2026-09-27T10:42:32+01:00

He has gone to the underworld, and I am here.

A wonderful book. Threads the needle of being both poetic and accessible, modern while not trying to modernise an ancient perspective. Patroclus, perhaps, as our window into the story, does have a more modern outlook on life and violence, but the characters generally understand themselves in a Homeric manner. They are concerned with glory and honour, war and heroics, without self-conscious reimagining in more cynical terms that many adaptations do. And it deftly weaves a story of queerness into this, with Patroclus’ and Achilles’ relationship furtive and endangered not because they are gay (this is ancient Greece) but because of status, because of prophecy, because in the eyes of Gods and kings that the relationship diminishes Achilles, leading to a brutal story of queer erasure, denying them each other even in death. I sobbed my way through the last few chapters.

How to Get to Heaven from Belfast ★★★☆☆

2026-09-24T18:42:40+01:00

My feelings on this waxed and waned over the course of the show. Quite funny and I do quite like how it uses horror and thriller cinematography for comedy, but it’s never as amusing or as charming as Derry Girls, and I feel like the mystery was very dragged out.

The Simpsons S4 ★★★★★

2026-09-24T18:38:34+01:00

Rewatching something so familiar there’s still lots of jokes and little lines that seem unfamiliar, and cursing that caught me off guard. I certainly didn’t remember Apu calling Marge a bitch in Marge in Chains. A lot of that is probably the fallibility of memory, but when I started to see unfamiliar intro couch gags it reminded me how often I would see one particular couch gag a lot when the episodes aired on television over here: The long with with the circus performance. Episodes got censored for broadcast and to refill the scheduled block for the seconds that were cut here and there the couch gag would get replaced with the longest one. What I watched back then was shaped by the realities of television in a particular time and place, slightly different from what I’m watching now, slightly different from what people watching the original broadcast would have experienced. Everything is ephemeral in this way.